March 12, 2022

Yesteryear
One year ago today: March 12, 2021, FPGA anniversary coincidence.
Five years ago today: March 12, 2017, day one, the birdbath.
Nine years ago today: March 12, 2013, Ft. Walton? That was us.
Random years ago today: March 12, 2012, my best glasses, ever.

           Argh, a crazy storm. The rule that the harder the downpour, the sooner it quits didn’t apply. I was shopping out near Lake Wales when it hit after a six-hour buildup. The dog and I got soaked running out to the van, but one of the windows was open a bit, so there’s a lesson learned right there. I was out to Rural King for parts to repair a leak in the back shed. They don’t raise their prices on old stock, so I was able to get a enough copper fittings to finish the bathroom faucets. The taps are now $12 each.

           There was grumbling everywhere. A gallon of machinery paid went from $36 to $109 right in front of me. Tank up on my van under Trump was $36. Under Biden, I just spent $81. There are serious questions about how people are going to cope with this. Most of the aisles, except the food, were empty. I should seriously consider doing a $1,000 food run, even though all food is ultimately perishable and always hard to store.

           I can see my own budget has to be revamped on this one. Right now there is no end in sight to budget for, but I am super-glad I got most of the materials I need to make this place comfortable. If you want fancy, that might take forever now. I was just about to call Parson because 3/4 of this band lives in a flood zone. Sure enough, the roadways are flooded out. Cancel the gig tomorrow. No sweat, in Florida, you just do it the next weekend.
           Dog food. I don’t mind feeding him chicken, but not long-term. This trip, I bought a 40 lb bag of pellets, which I know he will eat. The big bag was cheaper than a couple lbs of the premium. But he’s had it too good for too long, time to get back with the program, Cash. It wasn’t fun lifting that into the van, you know. That’s not from weakness, but shoulder pains due to this nice weather. Just where I’ve been injured, I have no other joint pains.

           The plan is to spend the afternoon curled up in bed with my book on QBASIC. I have a system to programming and every task has to be broken down to match a computer command before I can do a good job. There are a variety of options to this sort of generalized programming, one of which is flexibility. I tend to design modules that don’t rely on anything except the parameters passed. It makes for some duplication of effort, but I don’t import other people’s mistakes. That’s where flexibility comes from. In C+ they just add more and more code, which is why I call their A.I. “pattern matching”. Most of the time the added code is needed to fix some quirk—and modifying the original code is too messy.
           With luck, I may be able to post animations of the display. It is simple and lo-res, but embodies all the 18 or so facets that A.I. has needlessly split into. An example of a module easy to tweak would be the moving dot. The motion is only apparent as one dot appears and its former image fades. Now suppose instead of fading, we want the trailing dots to remain and behave as an obstacle when met later. I remember this one from the 1970s. The dot slowly traps itself, but some of the patterns it creates are not as random as they should be.
           The picture? That’s this morning’s fried spuds. The mixed onions, celery, and chicken bits were sautéed separately in sesame oil. Then united only in the moment it takes to heat and slightly scorch the potatoes from last day. Thank the wonderment that Cash won’t eat veggies.

Picture of the day.
Abandoned ice factory.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.

           While the storm did not materialize, the suspicions that it would kept so many of us indoors, watching Jackie Chan strike another blow for the good guys. I confirm not being able to handle Cash, it’s five or ten minutes with that critter equivalent to a major walk with the Tennessee two. I let him out often enough to pee, beyond that a couple chase-the-sticks and I was more zonked than him. This is why they invented siestas and I was back in the ring, ready for a trip to the used washer place. It was closed. The people across the way said when the old man died, the son only opens a couple days per week. The hitch is nobody knows which ones.

           This picture is not showing peanut butter. Rather, during the later part of the Biden administration, these are known as “currency”. These were purchased at $1.95 per jar, the price today is around double that. And when the Democrats shut down the supply chain, and I think they are really going to try it, the price is $20 per jar.
           Immediately following the downpour, the temperature plunged to just above freezing with something rare in Florida, a wind chill warning. Brother, it was cold. DC is probably blaming Putin for that, as well. I made up a list of barter supplies, having taken note at the number of empty shelves at Rural King earlier. Who do I bump into but what’s-her-name’s husband, who is running the Karaoke show tonight. Sure, I’ll drop by, I’m designing a computer algorithm which is fun compared to that bar.

           I showed up just in time and it must have been payday at the mines again. The place was packed with husbands around the pool tables and wives in gossip groups. I saw a few regulars and to my surprise, three former bands were present in the audience. That guy who runs out of material, the mother-daughter band, and the top-knot guy who can’t really tell jokes. I say former bands because I’ve seen none of them on the circuit in a year’s time. We all sang so it wasn’t exactly amateur’s night, but the blog-worthy situation was the audience. Once again, the polar difference in our styles was blatant, principally to the mother-daughter as my turn kept coming around immediately after theirs.
           And that style is what I’ve said so often. Sing with the audience, not at them. The effect on the crowd was intense. The team delivered some great mood music, then I get up and have the pack the dance floor with every eye on the stage. I had strange women grabbing microphones off the stage and singing along, and boisterous women dancing like they wanted to lose weight. My three tunes for the night were “Jackson”, “These Boots”, and “Here’s A Quarter”. Yeah, I brought down the house, but my eternal question remains. Why is it never the gal that I want who I want that joins in? Nonetheless, my presentation is not lost to the club or the other entertainers, I work the crowd. Funny thing, how many musicians think they are good at that until they meet me. Lacking musical talent, I had to engage the audience since day one, and that was light years ago.

ADDENDUM
           I’m going to buy a sample FPGA, even though I cannot imagine any real use for it right how except for adder circuits. My goal is to program one, not to become a Zen master at it. In the interim, I will flowchart the small A.I. program I’ve referred to over the years. It is done properly, that is, one main control module, none of the void-loop bullshit, that calls various submodules to get the job done. Initially, it will just be a rectangular box around the edge of a screen. There ill be a single bright dot that appears at a random coordinate, then begins to move in one of the eight allowable directions. This apparent animation tries to continue in a straight line until it encounters and obstacle, in this instance the box.
           It can then choose from any direction not blocked by the box, including back along its own path. In that way, it is not Pong or the various screensavers that use a similar “bouncing” effect. I think a working model will be a much better demo of A.I. than writing about it. Remembering the dot is not programmed on what to do, it changes direction randomly and the idea is to see if it “learns” an efficient pattern. There is more to this, but that is the start.

Last Laugh